Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I'm not sure it's feasible to meaningfully regulate/legislate what a "healthy bank account" is for such a company. I'm not sure it is either, the law is a blunt tool and it's not always possible to legislate things like "be ethical". One potential way to do legislate this is to require that plaintiffs place funds in escrow pending the outcome of the case, to pay for the other sides fees if they lose. Occasionally c…
> One potential way to do legislate this is to require that plaintiffs place funds in escrow pending the outcome of the case, to pay for the other sides fees if they lose. Occasionally courts will already order this under current law. I'm not going to generally advocate for that as a good idea though, I think it probably has a lot of side effects and I haven't put enough thought into it to be sure it is a good idea.…
You would expect the value to be set by the court as an approximation of the amount of fees that they might award to the defendant (which in turn is an approximation of what a reasonable defense might cost), as the lawsuit goes on you would expect the court to periodically increase the collateral requirements on the plaintiff, since the total cost to defend the suit has gone up.
Small, legitimate, companies having to put up collateral is an unfortunate side effect, but if they have good claims (and can convince a lender of that) they should be able to finance it... so that's probably not the end of the world? It does seem like a bit of an access to justice problem, not really sure how I feel about it.
> They have to do the said research and put quite a lot of money in it (which is what makes those patents valuable and arguably a benefit to society as a whole), and that distinguishes them from an average patent troll.
This is true if they license the patent directly to the manufacturers, but that's not necessarily the case. It seems entirely reasonable for a company to discover a drug, patent it (so they have something to sell), and then sell the patent to another company that deals with licensing it out to drug companies.
A license management company (aka patent troll) in the middle comes with a number of benefits:
- Chances are there's still a lot of risk associated with that drug, e.g. it might fail in human trials, by selling the patent immediately you reduce your risk.
- Licensing patents is not your core competency as a drug discovery company, it makes sense to have an entity that handles licensing for the patents invented by many different drug-discovery companies.
- You might, for whatever reason, want to stop operating as a drug discovery company. Maybe you want to retire. This shouldn't wipe out the worth of your previous work.
Generally, assets being transferable seems like a good thing. A lot of our society is based upon that principle... and if patents are transferable, it seems inconsistent to say "you can do X with asset Y, and so can most other companies, but not if the only thing a company does is doing X to assets Y". Inconsistencies like that generally lead to weird arbitrage opportunities and inefficiencies in society...